Citizens Band

Overview

Citizens Band features four musicians whose traditional music I encountered while living in Paris and Sydney. Each performer is presented in a reenactment of his or her normal performance situation, and an abstract cacophony is generated from their combined music.

Geraldine Zongo, originally from Cameroon, lives in the northern districts of Paris. Each week, she goes to her local municipal swimming pool to practice Akutuk, a technique of water drumming that she was taught by her grandmother in the village river. A tradition passed down through families, Akutuk is usually played in polyphonic rhythms by groups of women as a way to give thanks to the river for sustaining the village. Zongo’s generation will perhaps be the last to learn Akutuk because so many people have moved away to the cities, as she did, and the ancestral traditions are fading. For her, however, water drumming is still a spiritual experience.

Mohammed Lamourie moved to Paris from Algeria in 2004. He is almost completely blind, but every day he rides the Paris metro, busking for his living. He sings traditional Algerian ballads and laments while playing a battery-operated Casio keyboard, which rests on his shoulder like a violin. In Citizens Band, he performs a song by the popular Algerian Raï musician Cheb Hasni, his musical hero. Hasni was assassinated by Muslim extremists in the 1990s for his outspoken lyrics about romantic love and taboo subjects such as alcohol and divorce. A small picture of him is taped to Mohammed’s keyboard.

In Mongolia, Bukhchuluun Ganburged taught music in a university, but when he arrived in Australia he had difficulty finding work and started playing the morin khuur (horse-head fiddle) and throat-singing on a street corner in an urban district of Sydney. Today, he performs professionally in concert halls and teaches music. In this video, he performs an improvisation based on traditional rural rhythms.

Asim Goreshi is a professional multi-instrumentalist who is well known on the world-music scene in Australia. He studied music in Sudan but was forced to flee fifteen years ago because of the war; he now lives in Brisbane, Australia, with this wife and four children. He has a PhD in music and travels extensively as a violinist, but he also drives a taxi in Brisbane, where he is known as the "whistling cabbie". Whistling is a secondary form of music for Asim. He says there are great whistlers where he comes from in the Blue Nile district of Sudan. During the harvest season, the playing of music is forbidden because people must get enough rest for the hard-working days. In the absence of instruments, people whistle. Here, Asim reenacts a whistling performance inside a taxi parked on Parramatta Road in Sydney’s inner west. The tune is improvised around traditional folk melodies.


2013

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 11